Actor-director-producer Anupam Kher was more of an author at a webinar session organised by the Indian Chamber of Commerce on December 9, as he spoke about the pandemic, the lockdown and how he dealt with it. Moderated by columnist, actor and keynote speaker Suhel Seth, the event celebrated Kher’s recently launched book, Your Best Day Is Today.
On why he wrote the book during the pandemic, Kher said: “I was fearful. I wrote it out of a sense of uncertainty and I thought the only way to fight it is to see a silver lining in a dark cloud. Am an eternal optimist. I wanted to see and feel that whatever is happening will give way to something rewarding.” He added that during the lockdown he heard the sounds of birds in Mumbai for the first time in 39 years and saw blue skies after a very long time. He explained that the process of writing helped him feel better about the situation. “All that people needed at that time was to be with close ones, get essential commodities and a WiFi connection. The process started with fear and ended with optimism.”
Seth talked about the audacity of hope amid the pandemic that swept through caste, income and every other strata and how Indians had been resilient through the crisis, to which Kher explained that India’s culture, scriptures and philosophy that go back thousands of years had steeled Indians without them realising it even. “Look at our epics. Look at what the Bhagavad Gita says, ‘You have the right to perform your duty, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions’. We have survived inavasions and foreign rulers, Mughals and the British. That Indians are special came across in this crisis period,” said Kher.
He went on to say that his mother contracted Covid, which actually helped him revisit the relationship between them. Elaborating, he talked about taking his mother out for a drive to lighten up and also getting a scan done for a cyst. To their surprise she had contracted Covid but Kher and his brother couldn’t tell her as the virus was all over the news and it could have impacted her negatively. “How could I now tell my mother that we had come for a drive and now you will have to be taken to a hospital because that’s what the doctor said? But all mothers are very tough, they don’t let their sons see their insecurity.”
He talked about the greed of humans and how people have tried to take away everything from this Earth without thinking of co-existence with other living beings.
Seth also coined a word ‘premdemics’ seeing the sheer amount of love people had for each other during the lockdown, from the richest to the poorest trying to help people, governments doing their best to mitigate the situation. Kher said: “There are too many critical people, we should ignore them and feel proud of our efforts.” Seth brought on the point of people getting to spend quality time with families, a positive side to the crisis, to which Kher said that he discovered that he was not as impatient and restless as he thought he was. “There’s a chapter of death in this book. I used to fear death earlier. Now I feel liberated. Now I listen to more people, I pause,” said Kher.
The session came to a close with Kher asking Indians to celebrate being Indian. “Be vocal about being Indian.”
